Scalability of the Air Transportation System and Development of Multi-Airport Systems: A Worldwide Perspective

With the growing demand for air transportation and the limited ability to increase capacity at some key points in the air transportation system, there are concerns that in the future the system will not scale to meet demand. This situation will result in the generation and the propagation of delays throughout the system, impacting passengers’ quality of travel and more broadly the economy. This thesis proposes the investigation of the mechanisms by which the air transportation system has scaled to meet demand in the past and is expected to do so in the future using a multi-level engineering systems approach. The air transportation system was first analyzed at the U.S. national level using network abstractions. In order to investigate limits in scaling of the U.S. air transportation network, theories of scale-free and scalable networks were used. It was found that the U.S. air transportation network was not scale-free due to capacity constraints at major airports, also preventing it from being scalable. However, the construction and analysis of a new network for which sets of two or more significant airports that serve passenger traffic in a metropolitan region (i.e. multi-airport systems) were aggregated into single nodes showed that it was scale-free and scalable. These results were also supported by a time series analysis of airport and multi-airport system growth. These analyses demonstrated the importance of regional level scaling mechanisms (i.e. development of multi-airport systems) in the ability of the air transportation system to adapt and scale to meet demand.